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Squillions: How money laundering won

lrb.co.uk

91–100 of 238 posts

Re: Squillions: How money laundering won

#91
post #74

I learned a lot about the AML system many years ago and still have some books about how it works on my bookshelf. It's fascinating stuff. A few minor comments. My wife and I have owned and used 1000 CHF notes quite a few times in the past. The last two times we moved apartments I paid part of the moving fee with a 1000 CHF note. We've also bought furniture this way. Nobody was surprised to see this and the notes were…

> You can't get any high value notes there, they just don't exist Yes, although this is mostly by capping the highest regularly circulating note at £50 after the war and then waiting for inflation. > And there's so much street crime, [mostly false] > and the police care so little about burglary, Sadly true (including "find my iPhone" reports; there was a joke during the Mandelson scandal that this was the one time th…

>>Sadly true (including "find my iPhone" reports

I'll give you one better. I know someone who had their nearly new Range Rover stolen in Manchester - reported to the police etc. Few days later, they found it parked at a car park near a big supermarket. Rang the police, they said well, if you still have the keys...just take it? And he was like hang on, you don't want to look at it, check for drugs, take fingerprints, you know, do any actual police stuff stuff around stolen property? And they were like nope, don't have the time or the people to come out, if you have the keys just take the car back and make sure you tell your insurer you got it, that's all we can do.

Re: Squillions: How money laundering won

#92

Here's an anecdotal thought: AML laws surprisingly work well to discourage offline transactions by tax-paying citizens, helping maximize tax reporting and improve tax collection. As a result, governments continue to strengthen and expand laws in that direction.

It used to be super common for many small businesses to be cash only or a 10% discount for cash. Likely the main driver for this was tax avoidance. I haven't seen a cash only business since covid. With a dwindling number of legitimate cash users, any business that is pulling in huge sums of cash well beyond the average is going to look increasingly suspicious.

I've seen barbers before Covid not accepting cash, after Covid happy to accept cash. The Covid rules for subsidies were very strict, sometimes having to repay all as they didn't fully comply. Cash gives protection against bankruptcy due to unfortunate rules.

Re: Squillions: How money laundering won

#94

The true crime is involving a multinational corporation in a transaction between two private individuals at the local market. I like cash because it's direct, and where possible I avoid paying by card because I don't want the merchant to pay fees to third parties. In Europe, most of the time, using cash doesn't imply avoiding taxes on the transaction, but having cash is essentially sovereignty .

FYI, handling cash has fees to "third parties" too. In a lot of cases it's a lot higher than just taking card.

My business needs to insure cash that we keep at the shop in case we get robbed, but that amount is much much less than we pay in credit card fees. In other words, we would much prefer customers to pay with debit or cash.

Re: Squillions: How money laundering won

#95
post #76
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good to know, thanks! This article was such a breath of fresh air compared to the usual "LLM-assisted" writing you get. Just sentences like this: > This isn’t just a problem for far-off countries of which we know little, like the EU and the US and China. Here in the UK [...] So good! I feel like I'm becoming an old cynic but if it's the tenth time on the day that I read an overdramatized "It's not X, it is Y" in an a…

This is the London Review Of Books. They will be one of the last bastions of non-AI writing, because they actually care.

It’s depressing how hard it is to find anything worth reading on HN lately. Everything is either an advert or slop essay.

The article here is outstanding.

Re: Squillions: How money laundering won

#97
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a result, governments continue to strengthen and expand laws in that direction. Which creates national security and sovereignty issues. Cash is robust and decentralised. There is a good reason Sweden went from pushing cashless to advising people to keep cash at home for emergencies, and were at least considering an obligation to accept cash for small transactions.

That's just a disaster planning POV. If you've ever been in a shop where the EPOS goes down, you'll know how chaotic it is. And that's just a macro scale.

[deleted]

Re: Squillions: How money laundering won

#98
post #19

" Bullough gives the example of a Mexican drug dealer who smuggles product across the border to the US. The drug in question would once have been marijuana, then cocaine, and is now likely to be fentanyl, which is cheap to manufacture and easy to conceal. The drugs are sold in the US for cash, which is used to buy, say, agricultural equipment. " Wouldn't the person buying the tractor in the US for $$$ have to show wh…

The short answer is yes. You can buy cars, trucks and tractors for cash. The more expensive the car, the easier it often is. Luxury cars in particular are routinely bought and sold for cash.

Not in the US without the dealer doing all the same work a bank accepting $100k of cash in a duffel bag would be doing. Plus filling out a suspicious activity report on top of it all. They might have a real hard time explaining to the feds that they truly did "know their customer" from a simple form and a photocopy of your ID.

Some dealers might be willing to do this for you, but most will not. They will direct you to your local bank to deposit the money and get a cashiers check instead. They do not want the liability of it all. Perhaps better chances at the Ferrari dealer you've bought 14 cars from over the past 30 years I suppose?

I asked my (luxury) dealer if I could pay cash the last time I bought a car and they basically said “hell no, we haven’t done that in over a decade”. The risk of being caught up in some drug money investigation or whatnot is too great.

Coincidentally showing up to your bank with a duffel bag worth of cash to deposit is a great way to both get your accounts closed, as well as be added to a blacklist so it will be very difficult to open an account anywhere else.

Re: Squillions: How money laundering won

#99
post #71

Aside: The author of this article wrote a fantastic novel that not a lot of people know about called “The Debt to Pleasure”. One of the best instances of the “unreliable narrator” I’ve ever read.

Good to know, thanks! This article was such a breath of fresh air compared to the usual "LLM-assisted" writing you get. Just sentences like this: > This isn’t just a problem for far-off countries of which we know little, like the EU and the US and China. Here in the UK [...] So good! I feel like I'm becoming an old cynic but if it's the tenth time on the day that I read an overdramatized "It's not X, it is Y" in an a…

Not a fan of AI writing but I find sentences like that to be fluff and would prefer a more concise article overall. That would also have been my critique prior to AI and is the reason I only made it about half way through.

Re: Squillions: How money laundering won

#100
post #5

The state's ability to track and criminalize people based on financial behaviors through deputized financial intermediaries is new, and temporary. Outside of this social graph, where private cash transactions still exist, the state lacks power and relies on stigmatizing cash ownership, consumption, movement. This stigma is largely successful and ubiquitous but inconsequential to anybody that matters or has a lawyer o…

Where cash is stigmatized? I haven't seen such a place except PRC. Most people want government to be able to seize assets of baddies. It is possible with cash, it is possible with banks, hardly possible with crypto. The technology to scam people at scale with untraceable emoney is not everybody's cup of tea. Speaking from a country that invaded its neighbor, for our government (as well as north korea) it is lovely to…

I don't understand what is meant by "hardly possible with crypto." I've been hearing that for a long time but I've also heard so many stories about theft of crypto assets and seizures by government. In the US that seems to have slowed to near nothing with the current administration but it doesn't seem to be a capability issue. Or maybe I misunderstand you or the situation?
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